Advocates for books that matter.

Liesl Olson

Wonderfully knowledgeable and just as wonderfully readable, Chicago Renaissance will be essential not just for anyone interested in the history of the city but for anyone interested in a brilliantly variegated history of its contribution to modernism."— Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago

"Liesl Olson has written the book Chicago has been waiting for—a rich, rigorous and definitive cultural history of its turn-of-the-century heyday that’s as lively as the time."— Thomas Dyja, author of The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream

“This is modernism in all its technicolor glory, Chicago style: the literary ladies and the porkpackers, the Bronzeville poets and the scribbling ad-men. Dazzlingly learned, revelatory and a cracking great read.”—Deborah Cohen, Northwestern University